Black List (24 page)

I dream.

A confused dream, jumbled thoughts and images tumbling through my head.

I’m standing in Tim Dixon’s cubicle of an office, waiting while he reads through a report on everything I’ve done so far. The expression on his face tells me the news isn’t good.

‘
Oh dear, Alex. This really doesn’t make for good reading, does it?’ he asks in his most patronizing tone, looking up from the document. ‘You can’t honestly believe you’re cut out for this, can you? I mean, you’ve barely done a thing right since this all started.’

I look down at my feet, unable to look at him.

Sweating, I stammer a reply. ‘I-I didn’t know what—’

‘
Shut up, you useless bastard,’ Dixon snaps. ‘And look at me when I’m talking to you.’

Reluctantly I drag my eyes up to look at him, except he’s not Dixon any more. He’s Gregar. Sitting behind the desk, with the top of his head blasted apart, blood dripping down his face onto his neatly pressed work shirt.

‘
Look at me, Alex,’ he says.

But I can’t, because his eyes have already rolled back into his head.

I open my mouth to scream in horror, but no sound comes out. Instead I stumble backwards, groping blindly for the door handle as Gregar rises from his chair on dead legs.

‘
Look at me, Alex!’ he yells, rounding the desk and coming right for me, arms outstretched to grasp at my clothes. ‘Look at me!’

Alex awoke with a start from an uneasy sleep, his heart pounding and his skin coated with a faint sheen of sweat. The pain from his injured ribs at the sudden movement barely troubled him, the urgency of the moment overriding such minor discomfort.

For several seconds he sat upright in bed, staring into the darkness around him as if hidden terrors waited to spring at him from every shadow. Gradually however the clawing fear of his nightmare subsided, allowing him to think more rationally.

It was just a dream. He was safe here. Well, as safe as one could be as a wanted fugitive in a foreign country, spending the night in an apartment controlled by an intelligence officer of dubious intentions, with a woman he neither understood nor trusted.

He was tired and his injured body was keen to remind him of everything it had been through over the past few days, yet he had no desire to go back to sleep. The dreams that seemed to find him were no better than the reality that surrounded him.

He lay in bed for a few minutes more, unsure of what to do but reluctant to make a move. Finally however he’d had enough.

‘Shit,’ he muttered, throwing the sheets aside and pulling himself out of bed.

Trying to be quiet, he crept down the hallway towards the living room, pausing for a moment outside Anya’s door and straining to listen for any sounds within. There was nothing. No snoring, no breathing, no movement of a body on the mattress.

He wondered if she was even in there, and briefly contemplated opening the door to check, before abandoning the notion. Still armed with the automatic that he was sure she kept under her pillow, there was no telling what she’d do if someone tried to enter her room in the middle of the night. Being shot and killed by his only ally would make for a disappointing way to go out.

Instead he carried on towards the big open-plan living area, crossing the room before coming to a halt in front of the main windows. There he stood and stared out across the brightly lit skyline of central Oslo. With a population of just over 600,000 people, Norway’s capital city could hardly be considered a sprawling metropolis, but from this height the view was nonetheless impressive.

Leaning forward, he closed his eyes and allowed his forehead to rest against the cool glass. It was so quiet up here, he realized. The apartment’s triple-glazed windows filtered out all noise from outside, leaving the interior bathed in tranquil, meditative silence.

Seen but not heard; he wished he’d had that option back home in London, where the blare of car horns, the rumble of trains, and his neighbour’s love of heavy metal music had been a constant intrusion into his life.

Not that that was much of a concern now, he reminded himself with a flash of grim humour. He was a fugitive now. Home for him no longer existed. Perhaps it never really had.

He heard the soft tread of bare feet on the wooden floor, and opened his eyes as Anya appeared beside him. She said nothing, just stood there at his side staring out across the city. Some people might have considered such behaviour odd, but for him it was starting to make sense. Words weren’t always necessary; sometimes it was enough just to be there. She seemed to understand that better than most.

‘Couldn’t sleep either?’ he asked.

She gave him a sidelong look, a hint of humour in her eyes. ‘You do not move as quietly as you think, Alex.’

It was a minor jibe, but he sensed no offence was meant. ‘I’m new to this,’ he said without apology.

‘So I noticed.’ Anya surveyed him for a long moment, no doubt sensing his tension and unease. ‘You have something on your mind.’

‘Lots of things, actually.’ He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. ‘The man you mentioned earlier – the one who helped create the Black List. Cain, wasn’t it?’

He stole a glance at her just as he said the name, and saw that same look as during their earlier conversation with Halvorsen. The same moment of recollection, the same flicker of pain.

‘What about him?’

‘He means something to you, doesn’t he?’ Alex asked. ‘Or he meant something once. I saw that look when you mentioned him before, and… I see it again now.’

‘You notice things,’ she conceded, looking none too happy at his observation.

‘I remember things,’ he corrected her.

She elected not to follow up on that one.

‘Why do you want to know about him?’

He shrugged, deciding to give her the only thing she ever expected – the truth. ‘Because you don’t want to tell me. Which means he’s important, and you don’t like to give away things that are important. I understand that, but I’m asking anyway because I want to know what I’m risking my life for. I think I’ve earned that right by now. You can tell me it’s none of my business, or that I’m safer not knowing, or a hundred other versions of the same bullshit if you like. I don’t care, and I can’t make you talk. But you asked, so… there it is.’

The woman stood beside him in brooding silence for a time. It was hard to tell if she was angry or conflicted by his persistent questioning, yet she made no move to leave. And he began to wonder if he’d been wrong.

Perhaps she did want to tell him after all. Perhaps this had been festering away inside her for longer than she cared to admit.

‘Marcus was… my mentor.’ She said that word with some reluctance, as if acknowledging an unpleasant truth. ‘He brought me into the Agency, guided me through the world he lived in, even helped me understand the men who ran it. He made me believe that I could be like them one day – we both could. We could make the decisions that truly mattered, change the world for the better. One day.’ She cocked her head and frowned, as if intrigued by the memory. ‘But we had to fight for it. Marcus made me fight. Not against the men, but against myself. Against the fear, the smallness, the weakness. Against everything that could hold me back. Until eventually I became what he wanted me to be… for a while.’

It was hard to describe the change that had come over her as she spoke. It was as if the layers of armour that she had built up around herself had begun to fall away. The hardness, the coldness, the hostility were being discarded little by little with each word, revealing a glimpse of the soul that lurked behind them.

‘What went wrong?’

He heard a sigh then. The weary sigh of someone replaying old mistakes.

‘I wish I knew,’ she said, and never had he been more certain that she meant it.

Coming from someone who always seemed to have the answers, who always had a plan or a way out of any situation, such an admission of fallibility was nothing less than shocking to him.

‘So now you’re on the run from him. Cain?’

A faint, sad smile. ‘From Cain. From the Agency. From the Circle. From everything.’

‘This is my life now as well, isn’t it?’ he asked in a moment of frank honesty. ‘Even if we get the Black List and you find the answers you’re looking for, it’ll never be over. I’m going to be hunted for the rest of my days.’

Anya said nothing to this. There was no need.

‘How do you live like this?’

How long could one exist on that knife-edge between life and death, waking up each day not knowing if you were going to see the next? Alex knew she had already survived far longer than he ever could.

She thought about it for a moment. ‘Day by day. I suppose it has always been that way for me.’

‘Didn’t you ever have a… normal life?’

He didn’t mean it as an insult, and he hoped she understood that. He was merely seeking, whether he knew it or not, some kind of common ground on which to base his understanding of this woman.

‘What is normal?’ She turned to look at him, her eyes betraying deep sadness and regret. And he could guess why – because she really didn’t know the answer.

‘No CIA, no running, no hiding. Even you must have had that once.’

She thought about that, as if genuinely trying to remember a life without all of this.

‘I don’t often think about before,’ she admitted with some reluctance.

He frowned, struck by her odd choice of words. ‘Before what?’

He saw a flicker in her eyes then, a moment of hesitation, as if she’d just said something she hadn’t intended to.

‘You were right about me, Alex. I had a life once, a family, even a future. And I was very different from… what you see now. Quiet, gentle, a daydreamer. But it all changed. Everything I thought was so safe and permanent was taken away from me, and I knew I couldn’t be that person any more if I wanted to survive. I had to be someone else. Someone without fear or weakness or regret. Like… an actor playing a role. And I’ve played that role, been that person, for so long now, I don’t… know how to be anyone else. But I see it sometimes in my dreams. Always the same dream.’

‘What do you see?’

The woman shrugged, reached up and moved a lock of blonde hair away from her face. It was an instinctive gesture he’d started to notice when she was stalling for time. He made no move to press her, knowing she would either speak or remain silent as she alone decided.

‘It’s evening, the sun is just touching the horizon. I’m lying in the long grass near my home, staring up the sky. A perfect sky. One that...seems to flow from day into night, from horizon to horizon. You know this?’

Alex nodded. He had seen evenings like that, and even recalled the strange sense of longing and wistfulness they could provoke in him.

‘I breathe in, and I can smell earth and pine needles and wild flowers. I feel safe, content – the way you only can when you’re a child. And it feels good.’

She smiled a faint, bittersweet smile, and once more he was offered a glimpse of the person beneath the armour. The woman who still grieved for a life of mistakes and failures far greater than he could understand.

‘And then when I look up, I see the contrail of an aircraft cutting across the sky. I watch the sun glinting off it, the endless blue of the sky beyond, and… I smile. And I know, somehow I understand then, that it will be the last thing I ever see.’

‘What do you mean?’ Alex asked, his voice hushed.

She blinked, dismissing the memory. ‘It’s a dream, nothing more. The little girl who saw and felt those things… she is gone now.’

Alex looked at her, struck by the sadness and longing in her tone. It was as if she was mourning someone who had passed away.

‘No she isn’t,’ he said, not sure whether it was appropriate to challenge her on something like this or not. All he knew was that it was what he wanted to say. ‘She’s standing here next to me. She’s just… waiting for a chance to get out.’

Anya met his gaze only for a moment.

‘Try to get some rest,’ she said, moving away from the window. ‘We have a long day ahead of us tomorrow.’

Alex watched in silence as she quietly retreated from the room.

I didn’t know what to think as I watched her leave. She’d told me more about herself in those five minutes than she had in the past five days, and yet I felt like I had more questions than ever before. It was as if I had the pieces of a jigsaw, but no idea how they fitted together.

Who was she really, beneath all the armour she’d built up around herself? Why did the CIA, the Circle, even this Marcus Cain, really want her dead? What was driving her to risk everything for the Black List, and what would happen to me when she got her hands on it?

I was caught up in something I couldn’t begin to understand, something much bigger than me, and maybe even her. Something that could easily end lives, including my own.

And yet, for the first time in my entire life, I actually felt like I was doing something meaningful. I doubted they’d write songs about me or enter my name in the history books, but maybe, just maybe, I’d live through this and know I’d been able to help someone.

That was the plan, at least.

Alex awoke to the smell of coffee and cooking food. Intrigued, and very much aware that he hadn’t eaten a proper meal in some time, he slipped out of bed, pulled on his jeans and t-shirt and padded through to the living area.

Anya was there already. And so, it seemed, was breakfast.

‘You are having a laugh,’ he said, eyeing up the plates of scrambled eggs, toast and bacon laid out on the dining table as only a starving man could. After going to bed on an empty stomach, he’d scarcely beheld a more welcome sight. ‘Where the hell did all this stuff come from?’

Anya shrugged as she poured herself a cup of coffee. ‘There is a convenience store not far from here. They open early.’

He frowned, remembering Halvorsen’s words of caution last night. ‘I thought Kristian said not to go outside?’

‘I have spent enough of my life being hungry,’ she said. Had such a statement come from another person he might have dismissed it, but the look in her eyes told another story. ‘Anyway, we have a lot of work ahead of us today, so sit and eat.’

He wasn’t about to argue with that. Taking a seat at the table, he picked up his cutlery and took his first bite. Straight away his face contorted in a grimace. ‘Jeez, the bacon’s a bit underdone.’

Anya’s eyes shot up from her plate, and he grinned in amusement.

‘Just kidding. Don’t shoot me.’

Again he saw that faint half-smile he’d come to associate with moments like this. ‘No promises.’

Unsure whether she was serious or not, he attacked his breakfast with the kind of focussed determination that only comes with prolonged hunger. Not only had he barely eaten over the past few days, but he’d expended great amounts of energy at various times in evading their pursuers, trekking through rough woodland or swimming against fast-flowing river currents. Being a wanted man was apparently enough to work up quite an appetite.

If he made it out of this alive, maybe he could market it as the next fad diet.

Only when he’d destroyed most of his plate did he turn his attention back to the woman sitting opposite. ‘So what’s our plan?’

‘We wait for Kristian to return,’ Anya decided. ‘If there is no word from him by midday, we leave and take our chances.’

‘Sounds… less than promising. You think he’ll live up to our deal?’

Anya took a sip of her coffee. ‘I’ve known him a long time. He would not let us down on purpose.’

That didn’t exactly inspire confidence. Just because he didn’t consciously betray them didn’t mean the man couldn’t fuck things up. Then again, as with so much that had happened over the past few days, the matter was beyond his control.

Finishing her food, Anya rose from the chair and carried her plate into the kitchen. She was wearing only jeans and a plain white tank top, leaving her neck and shoulders exposed as she turned away. Her injured arm was plainly visible, the wound now bound up with a clean and properly applied dressing.

But there was something else that caught Alex’s attention; something marring the tanned and otherwise unblemished skin across her upper back. Straight and silvery-white, it looked to him like old scar tissue. Several such lines appeared to crisscross each other, as if she’d been deeply cut or scratched somehow.

‘What happened there?’ he asked before he could stop himself.

‘What do you mean?’ She was busy running the dishes under hot water.

‘Those scars on your back.’

Just like that, she stopped what she was doing and turned to face him, as if to hide what she hadn’t realized she had revealed. The expression on her face was quite different from the look of cool composure he’d become accustomed to. Instead she looked almost embarrassed, as if he’d just seen her stepping out of a shower.

But there was something else there too. Something deeper and stronger than mere embarrassment. Pain, old pain, as a long-buried memory was dragged to the surface once more.

‘It was a long time ago. I made a mistake.’

‘What sort of mistake?’

‘I trusted the wrong people. And I paid for it.’

Alex was about to speak again, fascinated by what he was hearing, but the click of a key in the front door told him someone was about to enter. He saw Anya unobtrusively reach for one of the knives in a chopping block next to sink as the front door swung open to reveal Halvorsen.

He had clearly been busy since their last meeting. If possible, he looked even more tired and haggard than Alex. Dumping a pair of canvas holdalls that he’d been carrying, he surveyed the apartment’s two occupants.

‘The arrangements have been made,’ he announced. ‘I had to call in a few favours to make this happen at short notice, but I have new passports for you both.’

He tossed one to Alex, who barely managed to catch it after setting down his cup of coffee. Opening it up, he studied the photograph ID page for several seconds. Apparently his new name was James Williams, and he was now a Canadian citizen. It looked legitimate enough, though he wondered if immigration officials would be so easily fooled.

‘Really?’ Alex asked, slipping the passport into his back pocket. ‘Do I sound Canadian to you?’

‘Right now you look and sound like shit to me.’ Placing his foot behind one of the holdalls, Halvorsen shoved it across the floor to Alex. ‘I had to guess your size, but there are clean clothes and washing kit in there. I suggest you use both.’

Unconsciously Alex reached up and scratched at the stubble that coated his jaw. It had been a couple of days since his last shave; a fact he was becoming increasingly aware of. ‘Nice of you to notice.’

Kneeling down, he unzipped the bag and was surprised to find a folded, neatly pressed business suit inside. He was far from an expert in men’s fashion, but even he could tell that it was high-quality and expensive.

‘The three of us work for an engineering consultancy firm,’ the Norwegian explained. ‘We are in Istanbul to advise on stabilizing the foundations of a mosque that is being restored. You two are my personal assistants. I have made sure you pass through Norwegian border controls without being detained, but the cover story will be needed once we arrive in Turkey.’

Anya hadn’t missed the intent behind his brief summary of their roles. ‘I did not agree to you being part of this.’

‘You said you needed my help,’ he reminded her. ‘Well, here I am.’

‘I needed information and resources, not a hired gun. You haven’t been a field operative in a long time.’

‘Neither have you.’

‘That’s different. I’m still trained for it. But you are . . .’ She trailed off, unwilling to finish that line of thought.

‘Old and fat?’ He smiled, perhaps amused that he might have succeeded in embarrassing her. ‘Anya, I’m not talking about infiltrating that building with you. But a job like this can’t be done with just two people, only one of whom is a trained operative. You will need my help in Istanbul, whether you’re ready to admit it or not.’

Anya eyed him hard. Alex could guess she didn’t like being strong-armed into anything. Still, even she couldn’t deny the merits of what he was saying.

‘Fine,’ she conceded with sour grace, kneeling down to open up her own holdall. ‘Just remember that this is my operation.’

‘As if I could forget.’

Seeking to dispel the tension, Alex interjected with a question of his own. ‘Not to sound like a naysayer, but how exactly are we supposed to get out of Norway?’

The Norwegian smiled. ‘You will see.’